Bethesda game director and caretaker of all things Elder Scrolls, Todd Howard, has said Skyrim's progression system is closer to the recent Fallout 3 series of titles than Oblivion.
"[Skyrim]'s a lot more like Fallout 3, where as you level up you are going to see harder things, but the easier things stay around as well." explained Howard.
"You'll still run into the weaker stuff and you'll just decimate it,"
According to Howard the tougher battles will now be with new enemy types and special enemies.
Continuing, he went on to discuss the conversation system, which drops the meaningless chatter with no-name NPCs and keeps the player's interactions limited to characters of some importance.
"There's very few completely random conversations," he said, "We've gone more towards a system, like we did in Fallout 3, where they have a specific conversation with a specific person about various topics."
The lesson Bethesda learned from its post-apocalyptic FPS/RPG hybrid pertains to the construction of environments and using it to tell stories.
"We realised in Fallout 3 that that kind of environmental storytelling, where you come upon a little scene, is really good... And so we've tried to do it a lot more."
Howard promised that "just about" every dungeon will have something unique in it. We're glad to hear it.
Bethesda's released the minimum and recommended system requirements for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Comments
26 comments so far...
StonecoldMC on 27 Oct '11 said:
Really want to pick up Skyrim, however I just cant see where I will find the time to sink the countless hours its going to take to complete the Game. I cant see me doing the speed run in a few hours!
lonewolf2002 on 27 Oct '11 said:
Bet you'd find the time if it was a new Alan Wake game
Pre-ordered this baby (my own personal GOTY already ) just gotta forget the wife and kids for a few months when it arrives.
RustySpoon80 on 27 Oct '11 said:
How did Oblivion work? Were the enemies set at various difficulties from the start? So if you encounted someone at the beginning, they'd be the same difficulty as if you encounted them 100 hours in?
Not sure which system is best. I suppose the Fallout system keeps the game more open as you're not restricted to a set path.
StonecoldMC on 27 Oct '11 said:
Whats Alan Wake
?
KK-Headcharge78 on 27 Oct '11 said:
Like Fallout?...... what you mean looks like s**t, is more glitchy than teletext and flows like a desert stream?
Surely not.
lonewolf2002 on 27 Oct '11 said:
The enemies scaled with you so you could not in theory go back and just spank the starting areas enemies as you had levelled up they levelled up with you.
MattyR95 on 27 Oct '11 said:
As long as it's not glitchy as hell, I wont be too bothered. I found Oblivion more enjoyable than fallout but technically fallout was better (Enemies didn't level up with you etc). If it's as glitchy as FO3 and FNV i'll be very disappointed though.
Eternal Darkness on 27 Oct '11 said:
Seeing as they were using a pretty outdated engine to make them, I'm not surprised they were glitchy. But still very good games.
Skyrim uses a new engine which should stop that many gamebreaking bugs and glitches. But the game will have glitches and bugs it'll be impossible for it not to. For a game of it's size it'll definitly have quite a few.
Mmmmgrolsch on 27 Oct '11 said:
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or didn't bother to read the actual story after reading the headline.
Anyway misleading headline again.
Anyone buying Skyrim on launch is just mugging themselves for a game that is gaurenteed to be unfinished. I'll wait a year till people that pay £40 for ir will be out of BETA testing stage and the final parches have been applied
jim2wheels on 27 Oct '11 said:
I'll be doing the same.
MysticR on 27 Oct '11 said:
I know exactly what you mean; I'm really excited about Skyrim, but the onslaught of must-have titles over the next month means I can't possibly buy and play them all straight away. So far, I've pre-ordered Zelda and Assassin's Creed, with at least four big games that I want at release but just don't know where to find the time for.
It's frustrating that there has been such a drought all year, and now I'm forced to choose between so many great games that are all fighting for Christmas supremacy.
I'll get to them all eventually, but I hate waiting!
nb_nmare2 on 27 Oct '11 said:
Not quite. If you had already visited an area and there were still enemies left alive there, they would stay the same forever. Any enemies in an area you hadn't previously visited would scale up, though there was a limit in many cases, e.g. a particular enemy might only be level 20 even when you're level 30. There was also a lower limit on a lot of enemies, so if you were only level 5 and an enemy had a minimum level of 10, you wouldn't encounter it.
RandyChimp on 27 Oct '11 said:
Oh great, so it's more like the game I hated rather than the game I played endlessly. Fantastic.
mideonphish on 27 Oct '11 said:
The long wait is almost over!
The tension is killing me here, I am in danger of going stark raving crazy just waiting for this game to come out.
I so want to play this game that its not even funny just how much I want to play it!
Mmmmgrolsch on 27 Oct '11 said:
Did you not read the story either?
MattyR95 on 27 Oct '11 said:
That's why I probably wont get it straight away, maybe Christmas or next year.
Sammy_bham on 27 Oct '11 said:
so basically all of Oblivions amazing gameplay, lore, storytelling and action etc.
along with the convos, npcs, random events of fallout 3???
count me in!
(already pre-ordered it) - but double SOLD.
fallout 3 was excellent. buggy yes. addon packs especially. but never-the-less.... amazing. 3 complete play throughs and loved it. takng some of its best elements and adding to the amazing-ness of oblivion...
awesomesaurus.
and to all the silly comments above... please read the whole thing before jumping to conclusions, you make yourselvs look like idiots...
gmcb007 on 27 Oct '11 said:
On a sort of related note: I'm just glad Bethesda has finally ditched that horrid Gamebryo engine and replaced it with a cleaner, up-to-date one. It makes me excited to think how pretty the next Fallout may look (and possibly playable on day 1!)
lonewolf2002 on 27 Oct '11 said:
I'm paying £27 for mine as getting it on PC , I never had one issue in oblivion on PC when it was released and did not have one issue when I installed it on my Win 7 64 bit PC again recently. Not saying that issues did not exist it's just not everyone experienced them.
lonewolf2002 on 27 Oct '11 said:
Yeah couldn't remember the exact nature of the scaling, just remembered it was there.
flash501 on 27 Oct '11 said:
Yep, I got it on 360 at launch, and bar it freezing once in a blue moon, I never really had any trouble with Oblivion, and I put over 100 hours into it. It's very unfair to compare it to Fallout with regards to bugs.
Mmmmgrolsch on 27 Oct '11 said:
My bad. Just when I see 'Bethesda' I think 'most buggy games this gen' but that's because Fallout 3 f**king hated me
80hrs in that game and never got to finish it due to a few game breaking bugs.
RandyChimp on 28 Oct '11 said:
I have no time for reading stories. I read the headline, make an idiotic assumption and then bitch in the comments.
Lol, sorry, I didn't read it, I should have, rather than jumping to a conclusion.
Mmmmgrolsch on 28 Oct '11 said:
Fair enough. The problem with CVG is that they always use misleading headlines like The Sun. Even most of the story they put up are taken out of context to spin it off as meaning something else to get people looking.
RandyChimp on 29 Oct '11 said:
Indeed. Nice misleading headlines, and when they have no news, fanboy baiting. Always nice to have impartial media sources isn't it?
MisterBedo on 29 Oct '11 said:
and yet we all keep coming back.....
Ditto. I played through Fallout 3 twice on the 360. I think it froze on me once, and that was on the second run through and may have been more to do with my 360 getting a bit warm. Weird how some people seemed to hit a ton of bugs whereas others had none.
I'll be getting Skyrim on the PC though, but only because I finally have a "Hooge MegaBeast Pwnz N.E.Game ™ " PC.
Yes, I'm bragging but I haven't had a decent PC for years and years, so legally I'm allowed to crow.